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Who's pushing politicians' buttons? Featuring the 10 worst corporate lobbyists

Inside this issue:

One oil company alone – Exxon-Mobil – spent $19 million on promoting scepticism about global warming in order to water down any legislation on carbon emissions. A group of banks, headed by Goldman Sachs, has in a similar way fended off tighter controls on derivatives trading, one of the main causes of the 2008 global financial collapse.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. With plenty of parties, politicians and ex-politicians for sale to the highest corporate bidder, what does this tell us about how we are governed? How can people begin to claim power back from the masters of spin, PR and brown paper envelopes? New Internationalist exposes the murky world of corporate lobbying – and suggests what can be done about it.

Plus Inside:

Susan George: our solutions to their problems
Hugo Blanco: Peru's legendary green Guevara
Eating: should we all be vegans?

Up in arms – How the financial crisis sparked a wave of popular protest

Inside this issue:

Why has the Great Recession, which has stunned the wealthy West, left the Majority World more or less unscathed? New Internationalist takes a closer look. We show how the Majority World learnt from the bitter experience of 'structural adjustment' to keep as far away from financial markets as possible. We listen to the voices of ordinary citizens in Latin America, Africa and Asia for the sense that's so conspicuously absent from the deluded din or economic orthodoxy. And, as the world wakes up to the true cost of the financial markets, and the resistance finally begins, we outline a 3D vision of a future that might actually be worth having.

Plus Inside:

Barefoot beekeeping: reversing the decline
Is private property a fair target for protesters?
Conspiracy theories: the dumb and dangerous

Makers of the miracle – So why are China's workers left out in the cold?

Inside this issue:

New Internationalist looks behind the impressive economic statistics to find the human story – the sweat and the struggle underlying China's impressive growth record. This is the tale of vast proportions – the largest migration in human history, the ruthless exploitation of the vulnerable, and the awakening of hundreds of thousands to their power and their rights. Analysis mixes with history and the voices of the workers to paint a picture of what is at stake for China and the world.

Plus Inside:

Noam Chomsky on US power and the Middle East
Tunisia, Egypt, Libya: What next for democracy?
Is ethical wealth a contradiction?

The Far Right Gets Respectable

Inside this issue:

Anti-immigrant parties and ultra-right populists have moved into the mainstream – legitimized in countries once proud of tolerance and diversity. If we are to tackle the growth of the far right, there must be an entire culture shift in the way the West views its minority communities and a 'retoxification' of extremist parties. New Internationalist looks at how this might happen.

Plus Inside:

Ben Okri: dreams for the future
A refugee's return to Rwanda
Is nuclear power necessary for a carbon-free future?

Banking on hunger - how speculators moved into food

Inside this issue:

Food has become a hot asset. Markets view food scarcity as the 'investment opportunity of a lifetime', and are pouring money into agricultural commodities. The impact is catastrophic, as speculators push up the price of food and force millions into poverty. New Internationalist investigates how investments in staple foods like maize and wheat have caused hunger. We find out about the financiers who are buying up African savannah, highlight efforts to buffer the Mahority World poor from market shocks and call for an urgent clampdown on speculation.

Plus Inside:

Do religious schools damage society
Bad break-up: Russia 20 years on
Whose debt is it anyway?
Wangari Maathai remembered
Corruption on Wall Street
Michael Morpugo's Pied Piper

The Almighty Influence of the Arms Trade

Inside this issue:

It's 50 years since US President Dwight D Eisenhower, in his farewell address to the nation, warned of the conjunction of the military and the arms manufacturers, and the undue pressure they could exert on lawmakers and state policy. Today we have moved from the cold war to Continual War, all at great public expense. Time to bring the arms industry into the line of fire.

Plus Inside:

Eurozone crisis: bailout or default?
Why is Johnson & Johnson blocking access to HIV drugs?
Occupy movement goes viral
Can Zambia stand-up to China?
Antony Gormley, close to the sky
The unreported year, 2011
Nnimmo Bassey's lyrical activism

Haiti two years on: where did all the money go?

Inside this issue:

What has happened in Haiti since the departure of the massed ranks of the global that reported on the earth-quake? The tent cities are still in place and the people in them feel forgotten by the outside world. To mark the second anniversary of the devastating earthquake, New Internationalist has joined forces with Cartoon Network and a leading Haitian journalist and artist to present insight into life in Port-au-Prince now - in the form of a graphic novella. Plus features from Phillip Wearne, Senior Consultant to the Haiti Support Group and Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano.

Plus Inside:

Hope for a Burmese spring
A second chance for Colombia's child soldiers
Horror flick: Mrs T at the movies
Israel evicts Bedouin villages
How mercenaries moved into aid
Juliet Stevenson 'I wish I'd been a human rights lawyer'

Game over! Time for a fair economy

Inside this issue:

A fair economy... Now that would be a fine thing... but seriously, as economies flounder, austerity bites and feral capitalism continues to make fortunes for some, while generating fear and poverty for millions more, is it possible to create an economy that is fair and sustainable? What will it take to reform finance, to bridge the growing inequality gap and to protect the planet from the actions of the filthy and the rich?

Plus Inside:

Photo update from Yasuni
Should assisted suicide be legal?
Blue bras and mettle - Egypt's women stand firm
Street-rooted storytelling from Foreign Beggars
How Josie Long found activism

Adapt or die: How Bangladesh is facing up to climate change

Inside this issue:

Crab fattening, saline-tolerant rice and floating gardens are some of the ingenious ways that Bangladeshis are adapting to the impacts of a warming world. Its population of 160million is squashed into a low-lying river basin, exposed to rising sea levels, fierce storms and frequent floods. Hazel Healy travels to South Asia to find out how communities with limited means are struggling to cope.

Plus Inside:

Should the West cut aid to human rights abusers?
Rebel Arab poet Adonis: 'democracy is consciousness'
The flip side to Bill Gates' charity billions
What Apple don't want you to know

Mental health - looking beyond the pills

Inside this issue:

The narrative of mental distress and illness often focuses on the individual: it is they who must work on their recovery. Yet the anxieties that trigger many mental disorders often arise from the social and economic conditions people find themselves in. While the sale of psychiatric drugs rockets, no pill exists yet to treat fragmented communities or the social ravages of greed-based economies. May's New Internationalist argues the case for restoring social health as an essential part of the mental health discussion. And there is a welcome return for popular author John F Schumaker, who explains why living in a material world is driving us to distraction.

Plus Inside:

Julian Assange: 'I was the fall guy'
Water: predicting shortage, creating profit
Should India still receive foreign aid?
Xstrata: killing fields in Peru
Commie kids - bringing up baby on the Left

Protection racket? Guide to the Rio+20 earth summit

Inside this issue:

Twenty years ago the world met in Rio to save the planet - with mixed results. June sees a major re-gathering - 'Rio+20: UN Conference on Sustainable Development' - which might decide a new course. The event is set to be heated and contentious. On the one side, corporations and the UN will be pushing a new 'Green Economy' agenda that emphasizes economic growth, technology and market based approaches. On the other, indigenous groups and many NGOs from both North and South will be promoting a human and nature-rights agenda that calls for a radical shift away from privatizing and commodifying the natural environment and towards protecting the global commons.

Plus Inside:

8 Great Greenwashers'
Award-winning essay: Doomsday no more - the Left looks beyond the crisis
Nike on the run
African grannies go solar
Bye bye welfare, hello workfare
Ghana's gold rush
Why American Jews are falling out of love with Israel

Teamwork - how co-operatives can save the planet

Inside this issue:

Look around for a moment. The world appears to a pretty unco-operative place, torn by vicious squabbles and bloody violence. Indeed 'watch out for number one' seems to be the driving credo behind a global economy ruled by greed, blind ambition and self-interest. But there's more to the story than that. There's another approach to human affairs that has yet to receive its due and is exactly the opposite of the cutthroat, competitive model model which drives corporations and agitates governments.

Co-operations: we would never have progressed as far as we have as a species without it. You could even say it's in our genes, as the new scholars of evolution have shown.

July/August's New Internationalist marks the UN's International year of the Co-operatives. Around the world more than a billion people are involved in co-ops as members, customers, employees or worker/owners. The crisis in growth and the global economic slump have uncovered an urgent need and a deep yearning for doing things differently. The continued success and growth of co-ops proves that's possible.

Plus Inside:

Syria's catch 22
The real Olympic winners
Confessions of a voluntourist
Speech Debelle on riots and hip-hop
Introducing Kenya's dam buster
Do governments ever have the right to cyber-snoop? Join the debate

If drugs were legal... what would happen?

Inside this issue:


As drug-related violence soars and use steadily increases, even political leaders, ex-drug tsars and former champions of the ‘war on drugs’ are admitting that it’s been an abject – and costly – failure. So what’s the alternative to prohibition? To follow Portugal’s lead and decriminalize the use of drugs, including heroin and cocaine? Or to go the whole hog and legalize the lot?

September's issue of New Internationalist tackles this thorny issue. We report from the drug war frontline in Mexico, with the intrepid, award-winning journalist Sandra Rodríguez. With the help of a medical doctor we take a look at what legalization would look like. And we push the boat out and ask if there’s any mileage in the notion of ‘fair trade’ drugs.

Plus Inside:

Should charities steer clear of celebrities?
Why African wars are ignored
Putin: the gloves are off
Who inspires Alice Walker?
Building protest in Sudan
Why the Left still needs Obama

Youth Rising - why apathy is not an option



Inside this issue:
With the ‘one per cent’ busy squeezing all they can out of the planet, young people are setting about making sure there’s still a kingdom left to inherit. Over the past two years, they have led a wave of dissent, whether in 140-character tweets or through chants of masses on the street. Young people from Egypt to Canada are working to articulate a blueprint for a new future.

In October’s edition of the New Internationalist we hand over our Big Story section exclusively to writers aged up to 25. Guest-edited by activist Jody McIntyre, the issue explores how young people are engaging with politics around the world. It looks at the tub-thumping victories of the Chilean student movement, airs the frustrations of Linah Alsaafin in the West Bank and has Laurie Penny explain why selling out is no longer an option.

Bad medicine - inequality's toxic effect on health and healthcare

Inside this issue:
With medical attention increasingly rationed even in the wealthy West and ballooning concerns over the quality of life for a growing elderly population is the notion of ‘healthcare of all’ beginning to seem impossibly utopian? As our societies become increasingly stratified, tiered healthcare systems increasingly reflect inequality. Three decades of pressure by the likes of the World Bank and the IMF to push healthcare in a ‘user pays’ direction has contributed to dismantling notions of care provision as a right. And it’s not just care that’s affected. Study after study points out that inequality directly affects our health as well, impacting those at greatest disadvantage the most.

November's edition also inspects the issue of drug pricing, where the pursuit of profit clearly comes at a human cost. And it checks out the possibilities of a revolutionary medicine, rooted in the community, accessible to all. This was once an agreed goal of world leaders at the tail-end of the 1970s – can it be revived now?


Plus inside:
Can GM be sustainable? Join the debate
Egypt's patriarchs must go
The Koch brothers: 'class warriors for the one per cent'
US Elections: when voting is illegal
Jeet Thayil: 'Inspiration is overrated'
Why Steve Parry hates Coldplay

Internet Showdown

Inside this issue:
Internet rights are the human rights of the future - and a global community of computer geeks wants to help you secure them. December's issue of New Internationalist gets all techie, dives into the world of free and open source software and meets those digital pioneers offering protection from snooping governments and marketeers.

We get behind the masks of political hackers Anonymous, with writer Quinn Norton, and marvel at designs - that are free to use, change and share - for new technologies for everything from prosthetics to small-scale hydroelectric power. We dip our toes into the weird and wonderful world of the 'makers' whose 3D-printers are turning data into the new raw material, while taking to task outdated and overbearing copyright laws along the way.

Plus - American mischief in the Sahara. A shocking report by African expert Jeremy Keenan on the escalating conflict in Mali reveals that the US and other Western powers have been colluding with the Algerian secret service to create terrorist incidents that justify the wider 'war on terror' in the region.


Plus inside:
Peter Tatchell: 'Don't outlaw hate speech'
Walmart workers rebel
The birth of Sollywood
Pakistani boys dying for oil
Why Mohammed Ali loves Birmingham

The feral rich

Inside this issue:
The feral rich… are always with us, but ever richer and more savage. With the war on the poor in full swing – under the rubric of ‘austerity’ – we are witnessing the rise of heartless plutocracy, and the seemingly inexorable increase of ‘trickle upwards’. What can we do to stop the feckless rich, as they ravage economies to feather their nests? Should they be allowed to have children, given the carbon footprints they create? Do they need parenting lessons to instil their insulated offspring with core social values and basic self-discipline? Can we stop them looting not only present but future natural wealth? Is it possible to teach them when enough is enough?

And for something completely different… we bring some good news from Greece, where people- and planet-centred alternatives are being grown in the harshest of economic climates.


Plus inside:
The unreported year in pictures
Crackdown in Ethiopia
Azerbaijan’s pompous kleptocrat
Jon Snow on Qada , Twitter and guinea worm
Why land rights are the only hope for peace in Colombia

What has development done for me?

Inside this issue:
On the 40th anniversary of its first issue, New Internationalist looks back over the four decades in the life of the world that the magazine has covered. Is the 2013 of privatization, smartphones and debt crisis caused by bankers any better in human terms than the 1970s world of state planning, telexes and debt crisis caused by bankers?
How much progress has the human family made in terms of improving life expectancy, challenging poverty and reducing inequality? And whatever happened to the idea of ‘world development’ that inspired the magazine’s founders?

The special issue also hears from a few of the key individuals featured in the magazine over the years to see what has happened to them since.
Amongst the other features in the magazine there is an in-depth report from Mongolia, a debate on whether male circumcision is justifiable, and a country profile of Egypt as it enters another period of uncertainty.

Demolition job – Why is housing in such a state?

The expression ‘safe as houses’ seems bitterly ironic these days, as housing has become a site of great insecurity. With property speculation unchecked, banks exposed for their fraudulent dealings (but still bailed out), and house prices bearing little relation to income, the housing market has become toxic. Property was the trigger for the current world financial crisis, and yet measures to curb property bubbles remain half-baked at best.

With our characteristic global outlook, this edition explores why decent housing has become so unattainable for so many and reports on citizen anger as well as alternatives to the marketplace.



Other features include:

* The inside story the Algerian gas plant siege

* Ken Loach on why ‘the Left needs to wake up’

* In our regular Argument slot: Should prostitution be legal?

* Obama’s failure on drone attacks

Land grabs

It’s been labelled ‘the Earth’s final round-up’. Investors are seeking to annex forests and farmland, anticipating food shortages, dwindling oil stocks and poor financial returns elsewhere.

We are four years into the phenomenon. And while the pace has slowed, the global rush for land in the developing world is still on. In next month’s issue of New Internationalist, we travel to Mozambique – one of Africa’s fastest-growing economies, where the drive to investment is intense. We meet rural communities dispossessed by powerful companies, speak to subsistence farmers at odds with Scandinavian foresters,
Indian rice giants and biofuel projects. But, as well as the woes, we will hear about growing South-South resistance to unbalanced deals.

Land grabs lie at the heart of development debates today. Will Majority World nations take the easy option, outsourcing agriculture and buying into the quick-fix private-sector promise to end poverty? Or will they tackle
hunger direct, by supporting long-neglected smallholder farmers? Do ‘win-win’ deals even exist? The path that governments choose will determine whether the peasants of today hold on to community land rights or become landless labourers of the future.

Argentina's Challenge
Is your business going bust? Then kick out the bosses and run it yourselves!

Are the big beasts of international finance wiping the floor with your economy? Tell them to take a running jump!

Argentina has been where some Western economies are now - broke and on its knees. But its people devised bold and creative ways to deal with their problems - solutions that persist to this day. The challenges have not gone away, there is still a lot to do, and the reality is far from perfect. But there have been some major victories - especially in the area of jobs, quality of life and civil liberties. From being one of Latin America's cruellest military states the country has become a human rights pioneer.

Next month's issue takes you to the complex land of the tango, where frustration and inspiration continue to do a fiery pas de deux.

Debt: A Global Scam

Human society is unimaginable without debt - the give and take that allowed our forebears access to a wider range of skills and goods than they could have provided individually. But it wasn't all happy reciprocity then either. Debt slavery was pretty literal in ancient Rome.

Today we are much more sophisticated. After decades of debt traps being sprung on some of the poorest people in the Majority World through no fault of their own, debt now riddles and corrodes the entire world's financial system. To what purpose other than concentrating the wealth of a small élite and striking at the heart of social cohesion?

Why are our politicians so keen to force-feed us austerity while paying lip service to the overarching problem of inequality?

And if we're all waiting for growth to rescue us, who will give a damn about sustainability?

Pirates: the arrgh-ther side of the story


Since 2008, piracy has exploded, particularly in Somalia, but also in new sites off West Africa. This issue of New Internationalist takes a look at the phenomenon as experienced by seafarers, fishers, tuna fish and the pirate rank-and-file.


Who are the Somali pirates? How did a few thousand ill-equipped men manage to cast the global economy a purported $18 billion? And what is the world missing by casting Somalia as a failed state with pirate villains?


World powers have unleashed a massive naval response to ward off the sea bandits. But at what cost? With unaccountable private armed guards flooding the oceans and the death toll of innocent fishers rising, we take a critical look at counter-piracy efforts to protect global trade.


Writers also delve into the rights of victims of piracy - primarily Indonesian and Filipino seafarers - in a notoriously cut-throat shipping industry.


And we report on the rise of 'petro-piracy' in West Africa's Gulf of Guinea, as Nigerian militants take oil theft on to the high seas.<

Girls Not Allowed


It's a man's world - and becoming more so every day. Latest UN figures show that 17 million females are missing - due to a combination of female infanticide after birth and sex selective abortion. This isn't just a demographic oddity - it's a social and global disaster.


The October issue of New Internationalist looks at why so many of the world's parents are opting to have sons. What are the consequences for girls - and society as a whole? In a few years' time there will be 30 million more Chinese men of marriageable age than women. A similar situation is developing in India, where there are already signs of increasing rape and abduction of girls and young women.


The phenomenon is not just an Asian one- in parts of Europe and North America, too, the trend is developing as technology makes it easier than ever to choose your child's sex.


What can be done to get the sex ratio back to normal? To ensure that girls are not only allowed - but welcomed into this world?

We Are Able


The language of disability is a political nightmare. Is it something you 'have', 'suffer from' or 'were born with'? Are you 'different', 'special' or exactly the same as everyone else? The guest editor of November's New Internationalist, Jody MacIntyre, dispenses with linguistic dilemmas to explore difference and defiance, in a personal confrontational attack on the notion of 'dis-ability'.


Elsewhere in the magazine, Maysoon Zayid gives an appraisal of attitudes to disability in Palestine, the comedienne Francesca Martinez talks about growing up wobbly and newly trained citizen reporter - and double amputee - from Sierra Leone Patrick Lahai tells his story.

The Frack Files


Fracking for oil and gas has become smoking hot. With new technologies developed in the late 1990s opening the gates, there has been a rush of speculators and fossil fuel corporations leading politicians by the nose in a new race to burn yet more carbon.


Politicians may dream of energy security and the promise of employment generation. Yet for communities affected by fracking the picture is very different - the industrialization of their environment; pollution of water, land and air; the pitting of neighbour against neighbour. It's no wonder that as the fracking boom goes global, there is rising resistance and protest at every proposed site.

Detained World


Across the globe, migrants - men and women, the young and the old - are routinely deprived of their liberty. The Eastern European states prefer isolated former barracks in the woods. The British go for closed prisons. Australians like to warehouse migrants in camps on their neighbours' land mass.

The problem is getting worse. States are holding people on the move for longer, and in greater numbers, than ever before. Between them, Europe and the US imprisoned close to one million migrants in 2011.

The January/February issue of New Internationalist will look at the consequences for migrants and society as a whole.